2008-07-25

A tag cloud is a useful navigation widget that you can install on your blogsite to help your visitors easily find the topics they are searching. To put is simply, a tag cloud is a collection of tags associated to your post – provided that you include tags on your posts. It is different from category links or archive links. Tag keywords are displayed on varying sizes based on the number of blog posts that include them. For instance, if you commonly use the tag “HTML” on your blog posts, that tag will appear to have the biggest font size compared to other tags.

Tag clouds are built-in features in some blog platforms such as Wordpress.com and i.ph. Unfortunately, tag clouds are not readily available in Blogger (Blogspot). This is intended to simplify Blogger templates and offer versatility to users. On the other hand, if you want to include a tag cloud on your Blogger blogsites, you can follow the simple steps enumerated below. Just make sure to first save your original template before proceeding. Just in case anything goes wrong, you can always go back to your backup template. You need to copy-paste three sets of codes on your Blogger template to include the tag cloud widget.STEP1: Login to blogger and go to the “Page Elements” setup page. Backup your template. Then go to the Edit HTML settings. Make sure that you do NOT check the expand widget box.

STEP2: Find the style sheet section of your template. Go to the ]]></b:skin> tag. Copy-paste the codes shown below just before the ]]></b:skin> tag.

STEP4: The preceding codes are only the setting codes. Now, you are ready to install the tag cloud widget itself. Locate the <b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Labels' type='Label'/> tag. This is called the label widget in your sidebar. Copy-paste the codes shown below and replace the aforementioned tag. Save your template after embedding the codes.

If you carefully followed the instructions, you can now preview your blogsite and will be able to see the tag cloud. If the tag cloud does not appear, you probably have not carefully followed the instructions or you probably do not use tags or labels in your blog posts.

POSTCRIPT:

You probably do not want the default settings of this tag cloud widget. But all of these can be configured. You can change the colors, font sizes, and other settings.

The settings in the Variables section will be where you make most of your adjustments. Here I'll explain what each setting does.

var cloudMin= 1;

This setting you can use to limit the number of labels shown (for example if you have a lot of labels). Leave the setting at 1 to show ALL labels. If you enter in a higher number, then only labels that have at least that number of entries will appear in the cloud.

The lines for maxFontSize maxColordo what you may think they do. The first one sets the size (in pixels) of the label with the most amount entries. The maxColor sets the color of that entry (in RGB format). Similar withthe next twominFontSizeminColor

Just these are for the label with the least amount of entries. Again the size is in pixels, the color is in RGB format. Any labels between the two will get their color/sizes based on how many labels they are, and where their entry count falls, giving the much desired cloud effect.

From my experimenting, there are many factors that make up a pleasant looking cloud. From color/size choice, to the number of actual labels, to how well be dispersed the entries are among the labels. 3 Labels don't make a good cloud as there isn't much to work with. You just have to experiment around to see what looks good with your setup.

IMPORTANT, when change the color settings, Keep them in the format supplied. In between the [] and the numbers separated by commas. The default colors are BLUE for the max and BLACK for the min. You can select any valid RGB color combination. If you don't know what RGB colors are, don't worry. It's just a way of defining a color. You can use many charts on the Internet toget the correct RGB value for the color you want to try. Here's one that is fairly good.

RGB Color Code Chart

Remember, if you get the 3 sets of numbers to enter them in correctly. Inside the [ ] separated bycommas.

Also experiment with different font sizes. Again it depends on how many entries, how dispersed they are, and how much room for the cloud is available as to what looks good.

The last variable there is

lcShowCount

This can either be false (default) or true. All this does is turn off/on the post count displayed next to the label. Usually in a 'traditional' cloud the count isn't used. But if you go to a 'flat' listing then it's sometimes useful to turn it on.

Now to the CSS section. Most people won't need to tweak these much, and it's not necessary to understand what all those entries are for. Most are just to make sure that other styling elements from the rest of your page don't inherit in and ruin the cloud. But there are a few that you may want to change to suit.

The first line

#labelCloud {text-align:center;font-family:arial,sans-serif;}

You could change the fonts used in the cloud here if you wanted. Also, the text-align statement can also be changed. I have it set to center by default but youcould use

Well don't worry about most of it unless you are a hardcore CSS'er. The only one of real importance is the first entry

display:inline;

You can change that to

display:block;

To get the 'Flat' (each entry on it's own separate line) listing of the weighted entries. Usually if that is set to block you would probably want to change the sort frequency fromalphabetical to frequency. You do that by editing the widget from the Page Elements tab inBlogger.

And the last bit I'll mention is the line

#labelCloud .label-count

If you set the lcShowCount variable to true to show the post counts, you could change the color/size of those numbered entries with that line.

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